Omg! Look At All The Camels!!!

I recall, as a child, being enamored with the Sudan "camel postman" stamps; I just loved the design. To this day, every now and then when I spot them in albums, online, etc., I say to myself "I oughtta put together a collection of these someday!" but the timing never seems right, and it gets forgotten amongst the myriad of other collecting tangents I find myself wandering down periodically as I embrace my collector's ADD.

Fast forward to last week when a stockbook lot of Sudan camel postman stamps showed up. ebay's 15% off coupon + Best Offer, and I just couldn't resist.

It's a disorganized mess, and I'm under no illusions that there are any rarities contained therein, but there could be some interesting cancels and other items in it.

Literally thousands of stamps here. Should be fun!

Very lovely stamps. Really cool design. I noticed there some Egypt stamps overprinted Sudan. I have some of those too. Catalogue notes than forged overprint are abound. Do you know a good reference site that can help sort them out?

PERFECT post for a Wednesday!!!
Don

Drooling over those! I just obtained about 20 or 30 of them, awaiting sorting, and thought I had a great find, but yours is light years ahead.

Beautiful. I will take your duplicates. Just send them on over. Or maybe you can do one of those giveaways and give everybody one or two. Or maybe I should give away some of my stamps and let you enjoy yours. HaHa

Yowza! That looks like a perfect way to spend a day. Look out for watermark varieties, particularly on the "horizontal camels", there are many including inverted, reversed, inverted and reversed, and some are quite valuable. The listing in SG is complete for varieties but stamps exist in both used and unused condition, despite what they tell you.

Flaws in the "traditional camel" include missing shading around the rider. Overprints on the Egypt stamps are notorious for forgeries, so tread carefully. I will dig out the information on how to distinguish the 6 different settings and post it, if I remember. I may have posted it a while ago, so it's worth searching anyway. There are perforation varieties on many stamps too. Plenty of flyspecking, too.

Have fun!

Dan,

Great find! I am sure you will be busting your hump to get all those stamps organized!

--Jim Wentzell
stampguyaps177-681

Great way too go ;build up a collection in 5 minutes. Your a Genius !

Here's the info I promised on distinguishing the 6 settings of the first provisional overprints. I'll work on the forgeries and post some of those to try and help you.

Excellent! Thank you for the information.

Found this quicker than I had expected! Here's part of a small display I put together on these issues, with some information on what to look for in the forgeries of the provisional overprints, and some examples. It's also worth bearing in mind that the genuine overprints were typographed, and some forged overprints (particularly found on mint stamps) are lithographed. Look at the stamps in incident light to check.

The bottom line is that the forgeries generally exhibit poor font, or it's too high / too long by a generous fraction of a mm. Once you get the eye in, it's pretty easy and you can build up quite a nice collection.

Hope this helps.